Adversarial Robustness of Independent Settlement Verifiers - ON-1210
Project type: ResearchDesired discipline(s): Engineering - computer / electrical, Engineering, Computer science, Mathematical Sciences, Mathematics
Company: jamais51
Project Length: 4 to 6 months
Preferred start date: 07/02/2026
Language requirement: English
Location(s): ON, Canada
No. of positions: 1
Desired education level: Postdoctoral fellow
Open to applicants registered at an institution outside of Canada: Yes
About the company:
jamais51 is an Ontario-incorporated Canadian-controlled private corporation (CCPC) developing next-generation digital settlement and payment infrastructure for Canadian financial institutions, with an initial focus on credit unions and tier-2/3 banks. The company’s platform is designed to improve transparency, interoperability, and operational resilience in emerging digital settlement environments through independently verifiable transaction and reconciliation systems.
Founded by a former senior regulator, Jamais51 combines regulatory, financial, and distributed-systems expertise to support Canada’s transition toward modernized payment and settlement infrastructure. The company’s broader vision is sovereignty-first financial infrastructure: Canadian-developed technology aligned with evolving domestic payment modernization initiatives, including the Real-Time Rail ecosystem and the growing interest in tokenized deposits and programmable financial instruments.
jamais51 has developed working prototype systems deployed on public test networks. The company’s research and development activities are supported by a portfolio of provisional patent filings in distributed settlement systems, digital monetary infrastructure, and verification technologies.
This Mitacs Accelerate project represents our first formal academic research collaboration and the beginning of a longer-term Canadian research partnership focused on resilient financial-system infrastructure and verification technologies.
Describe the project.:
Canada is modernizing its national payment and settlement infrastructure through initiatives such as Lynx modernization, the Real-Time Rail rollout, and emerging tokenized-deposit platforms. As financial systems become increasingly digital and real-time, institutions require new methods for independently verifying the integrity and consistency of settlement activity across distributed systems.
The industry partner has developed a working Independent Verifier: a software system that reconstructs and corroborates settlement activity directly from blockchain-derived event records using a set of integrity predicates and reconciliation rules. Initial adversarial testing has demonstrated that the system can detect multiple classes of intentionally corrupted or inconsistent settlement records.
The purpose of this research project is to formally and empirically evaluate the robustness limits of independent settlement verification under adversarial conditions. The research focus is not building the verifier itself, but understanding the reliability envelope of the verification methodology: what classes of inconsistencies are always detectable, what assumptions are required for soundness, and where undetectable edge cases may remain.
The postdoctoral fellow will:
• formalize classes of settlement-record tampering and inconsistency scenarios;
• develop mathematical and probabilistic models for verifier soundness;
• design adversarial simulation and stress-testing frameworks;
• evaluate detection performance across thousands of adversarial scenarios;
• characterize false-negative and false-positive behaviour;
• and contribute toward peer-reviewed publication of the research findings.
Expected outputs include an adversarial testing framework, empirical robustness benchmarks, formal verification analysis, and a publishable Canadian research contribution in distributed systems, cybersecurity, and financial infrastructure resilience. Anticipated publication targets include peer-reviewed venues in security, distributed systems, or financial cryptography (USENIX Security, Financial Cryptography, NDSS).
Required expertise/skills:
Required: PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field with research focus in distributed systems, cybersecurity, formal methods, applied cryptography, or financial systems infrastructure. Demonstrated capability in adversarial modelling, formal reasoning under explicit assumptions, empirical systems evaluation, and publication-quality research.
Candidates should have strong programming and research engineering skills, including experience with TypeScript and familiarity with at least one of following: Rust, Solidity, or formal-methods tooling such as TLA+, Coq, or Isabelle. Experience designing reproducible experimental frameworks and analyzing complex distributed-system behaviour is highly desirable.
Preferred qualifications include prior research involving:
• adversarial robustness of distributed or cryptographic systems;
• verification or reconciliation frameworks;
• formal verification methodologies;
• information-theoretic or probabilistic systems analysis;
• or financial infrastructure and payment-system research.
A demonstrated publication record at peer-reviewed venues (e.g., USENIX Security, NDSS, ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, Financial Cryptography, CAV, FMCAD) is considered a strong asset.
The industry partner will provide:
• an existing verifier platform and adversarial certification harness;
• dual-chain testnet deployments (Solana and Avalanche);
• settlement simulation datasets and tooling;
• technical specifications and research guidance;
• and ongoing collaborative review throughout the project.
This project is intended as a research-focused collaboration with expected outputs including peer-reviewed publication, open-source benchmarking tools, and empirical robustness analysis.
